But if you don’t own an Echo, and remain on the fence about the whole dedicated smart speaker/home automation hub experience, this will definitely feel like a nifty little over-the-air update. Once installed, the Huawei Alexa app needs to be initiated by touch, not voice, before it can understand hands-free commands for smart home management, online shopping, weather or traffic information, and good old fashioned web searches for answers to your most diverse questions.

“Even more capabilities” are of course on their way as the current list of 10,000+ skills gets heftier, but some existing ones aren’t “applicable at this time” on the Huawei Mate 9, including Timer/Alarms, Music and Tunein. Oh, well, it’s still nice to be able to choose between Alexa and Google Assistant on at least one big, bad, powerful and handsome phone.

Adrian has had an insatiable passion for writing since he was in school and found himself writing philosophical essays about the meaning of life and the differences between light and dark beer. Later, he realized this was pretty much his only marketable skill, so he first created a personal blog (in Romanian) and then discovered his true calling, which is writing about all things tech (in English).